The Secrets of Jin-Shei (39 page)

“Sevanna?” Yuet said blankly.

But it was Tai who made the connection. “Szewan,” she said. “Yuet, she means Szewan.”

“Do you?” Yuet said to Jessy.

“Yes, that is the name she took, but it sounds so harsh to my ears. I refused to ever call her by any name but the one she was born under.”

Yuet was staring at Jessy with wide eyes. “What do you mean? How do you know Szewan?”

“Sevanna’s grandmother and my own great-grandmother were sisters,” Jessy said. “She was barely fifteen when she left us, took up with healer in the city, became apprentice, took the other name. She didn’t want it to be widely known that she was Traveler-born. Well, half a Traveler. Her father was somebody on the plains, during one of our summer travels. One of the
chayan.
”

“The
chayan?
”

“That’s you,” Jessy smiled, revealing stained teeth. “The ones who stay. The ones who plant and harvest. The settled ones.”

“You’re settled now,” Tai said in a small voice.

“Ah, but I know the feel of the wayward wind in my hair,” Jessy said. “I will always be a Traveler. Sevanna wanted a different life.”

“No wonder that her books were so full of Traveler patients,” Yuet murmured. “That she sounded like they were friends to her, or kin.”

“They were. She was the one we all went to when we were in the city, or when we needed help with someone seriously ill,” Jessy said. “Well? Did she?”

“She didn’t send me. Szewan has crossed the river into Cahan more than a year ago now,” Yuet said. “She was my teacher, and now I am Healer in her place. No, she didn’t send me, not really. Something I found in her secret books brought me here.”

Jessy sighed. “I was hoping she had burned those books. There is nothing but trouble coming from that.”

“Can we talk somewhere?” Yuet said, dropping her voice.

Jessy turned her head, calling out to the other women at the back of the tables, and then strode over to the place she’d been sitting and collected her basket. “You don’t mind if I eat as we talk, do you?” she said, already unwrapping the slab of cheese and a roasted chicken drumstick. “We can go into the green tent, if you like, but we might as well sit over there on the benches in the sunlight. Don’t worry, nobody listens if you don’t look like you are talking secret things.” She laughed, her laughter loud, almost braying.

Yuet agreed to the benches, and Jessy folded her tall frame down onto a backless bench by a rough-hewn table.

“What did Sevanna tell you?” Jessy asked, sinking her teeth into the chicken drumstick and chewing loudly.

“Just what was in the books—that she was called in to pick up the wreckage of the girl when it was all finished and
he
panicked,” Yuet said, very obliquely, trying to avoid any names or titles at all. “And, later, that your sister had had the child, and then she died.”

“She had that child in defiance of all of us, Sevanna, myself, the clan,” Jessy said. “She knew best. She always knew best, my sister. She was promised something—or at least that’s what she said—and then it was snatched away from her. She said she wanted payback, but not even she was quite certain of how. Just that, one day, she would wreak her vengeance, and that Amri would be her weapon.”

“Amri?” Tai asked, startled.

“That’s what my five-year-old called her when she first started lisping and couldn’t get her mouth around Tammary’s name. It stuck.”

“Vengeance for being raped?” Yuet asked.

Jessy gave her a hard look. “No,” she said. “For being lied to, and then abandoned. Sevanna never mentioned that, did she? It only became a rape when the
Imperator
,” Jessy gave the title a different lilt, using the Travelers’ tongue, in which there was considerably less worship and respect attached to it than in the common tongue, “made the mistake of telling Jokhara that he already had his full complement of wives and concubines and that he would not be adding her to the women’s quarters on a permanent basis.
Then
she started screaming and fighting. It was then that he started really hurting her. Not before. She wanted it, before. You should have seen her dance for him that night, before he sent for her. She put her whole heart into making him want her body then.”

“But Szewan wrote that she was a virgin,” Yuet said.

“She was,” Jessy said. “She thought that would be the price for clawing her way up into the Palace. She was young, and arrogant, and thought she wanted to be royal.” Jessy snorted, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “The little fool. She thought she was invincible.”

“But in Szewan’s book …”

“Don’t call her that, not here,” Jessy said. “And yes, I know what she wrote in her book, she told me. But she always loved Jokhara, and it destroyed her to have her end this way. She swore she’d make the
Imperator
pay one day for what he did to Jokhara. I think she had her own plans for Amri.”

Tai could not suppress a gasp. Jessy looked down at her, and smiled, but her gray eyes were glittering and hard, like chips of ice.

“So, then,” Jessy said, looking up at Yuet again. “I am sorry to hear that she is dead, but I guess we all die.”

“I did not know that she was of your clans,” Yuet said. “I arranged her funeral according to our custom.”

Jessy waved her hand. “She lived that way, she died that way. It is well by us. We will remember her in our own fashion. But what is your purpose here? Do you want to take Amri, or destroy her?”

“Antian told me …” Tai began hotly.

“
Destroy
her?” Yuet said, in the same instant.

They stopped, glancing at one another. Jessy followed the look. “Antian told you what? Who is Antian?”

“The Little Empress,” Yuet said. “First Princess Antian, who would have been Empress today if the earthquake hadn’t taken her.”

“Ah, the one that died,” Jessy said, nodding sagely. “And what did she tell you, young one? Who was the Little Empress to you?”

“We were
jin-shei
,” Tai said. “She told me to take care of her sister. I dreamed of it; I dreamed her face, after.”

“Whose face? Amri’s?” Jessy was frowning. The Travelers took dreams seriously, and had interpreters who earned a good living interpreting the strange dreams that came to the folk of the clan. “What has that got to do with anything?” she asked, to Tai’s nod.

“How much does she know?” Yuet said, in a low voice, interrupting.

“Amri? She knows her parents are dead, and that I am her foster mother, and her aunt. She knows her mother was my sister. She knows she
is not wholly Traveler, that she has
chayan
blood—how could she not, with that hair and those eyes? But if you are asking if she knows that her father was your Emperor, no, she does not.”

Tai was suddenly aware of a silence where a murmur of conversation had just been, and instinctively whipped her head around.

At another table, set at an angle to the ones where she and the other two were sitting but close enough to be in earshot, Tai saw a young man with a puzzled expression staring at the retreating back of a girl who was almost running in the direction of the main fair and its bustling throng of people.

A girl with fox-colored hair and the grace of a dancer.

“I think she does now,” Tai said quietly.

T
ammary fled, first for the anonymity of the fair crowd and then through and beyond them into the woods behind the village. It was cooler here under the boughs of the pine trees, and there were still patches of snow in sheltered spots behind the larger trees. Tammary’s shawl was still on the bench where she had laid it down when she had maneuvered Raian to the closest free table at the picnic area so that she could eavesdrop on the conversation between her aunt and her two interesting companions. But it was more than just the chill of the shadowed forest after the warm spring sunshine out on the open fairground that made Tammary shiver as she hugged her shoulders with her hands.

All her life she had known that she did not quite belong, that she had been touched by a breath of scandal. But no more than that. She was different, yes—her dark eyes and her bright hair set her apart from the rest of the Traveler children with whom she had grown up. No secret had ever been made of the fact that she was not her aunt’s natural child, and that had been enough for the children, themselves aware of only whispers and rumors, to taunt her with her differences and take the usual childish glee in finding a victim they could torment. The more Tammary had tried to immerse herself in the culture of her mother’s people, the more pointed the references to her
chayan
ancestry had become.

“Your family has always run away,” some of the older ones had goaded Tammary. “Your cousins go away to the
chayan
cities, and your mother went and had a
chayan
man get you on her.”

“You don’t think you’re good enough for us, you always go looking for something better.”

“You aren’t really one of us,” the younger ones would chime in, unable to understand the innuendoes but all too happy to join in with whatever they could muster. “You ought to be keeping a yearwood stick with the
Imperator
beads!
Pol-chayan! Pol-chayan!
”

Half-
chayan.
Half-breed. Outcast.

She sought solitude when she could, growing up wild in the mountains. She had climbed rugged mountainsides by herself, had taken a near-grown falcon chick when she was only eleven or so and had trained it to come at her call, and ridden half-wild horses bareback, her skirts hiked up to her hips like a hoyden’s and her bright hair flying like a banner behind her. She had watched her peers learn the steps of the Traveler dances, and had gone off alone into the ruins of the Summer Palace and practiced them until she knew that she could outdance any of the village girls. But she knew that, should the clans go out again on the summer trails, she would not be one of the dancers who would do the shows for the applauding crowds, she would not be the one who would train a wild thing and show off her mastery to the admiring people of the cities on the plain. If she were taken along at all, Tammary would be the one closeted in the fortune-teller’s tent, if she was lucky, reading the cards for the women of the city who wanted a different point of view than that given by the
chayan ganshu
stones. She would be locked away in hidden places, wrapped in scarves and veils, kept apart from the
chayan
folk. A thing to be ashamed of or a thing to be protected—the children taunted her with the one and the adults sometimes gave her a distinct impression of the other.

After Tammary turned fourteen, still coltish and long-legged but starting to round out with the curves of womanhood, she thought she had finally reached some sort of understanding when some of the young men started paying attention to her. She thought she saw a road to acceptance. She had no real yardstick to measure what the other girls her own age were permitting in terms of physical intimacy, but when she had balked at the first deep kiss in the haylofts of the village, or the fumble at her breasts on a summer meadow on the mountain, or the insistent knee between her legs in the woods on moonlit evenings, it had all been countered with a devastating weapon she had no defense against.

“You’re half-
chayan,
after all. You don’t know any better. I guess I’d better go back to a girl of my own people who knows how to treat a man.”

So Tammary had accepted everything, and only woken up to the gravity of her error almost a year later, when she finally realized that no young man stayed with her for long after she had opened her legs for them, and that the other young women were laughing and pointing when she walked down the street. That was also about the time that her aunt had found out what had been happening, and had turned on Tammary in fury.

“You’ll turn out no better than your mother,” she had said, bitterness in her voice. “But at least she sought it in a Palace.”

So the quick blossoming of trust and acceptance was over, and Tammary withdrew into herself completely. When she did seek human company, she gravitated toward the clan elders, who were usually kind to her, or the very young, children who liked her and trusted her and accepted her without question, never asking awkward questions, demanding concessions Tammary had no desire to make, or tormented her with her own ignorance of the mysterious circumstances of her birth—for her aunt had never elucidated her final cryptic remark. All that was left between Tammary and her aunt was a sense of obligation.
I owe that much to your mother,
her aunt had said, and made sure that some of the other Traveler folk in the village felt the sharp side of her tongue. But Tammary concluded that it was damage control and not really defense, and resented the action. Somehow she felt it isolated her even more, not only naive but weak, someone unable to fight her own battles. But there had still been no more information than what Jessenia had blurted out in her anger—the brooding hint that Tammary’s mother had somehow destroyed herself with the help of the Court of Linh-an, and that her daughter was heading the same way.

When Raian had made his first friendly overtures to her, Tammary, then close to sixteen years old, had reacted with cold hostility. He had seen her working with her falcon in the mountains, and he was genuinely impressed with her knack with the bird and with other wild things that she managed to coax to her. She was so much of a wild thing herself by this time that she practically bit him when he first came forward to talk to her.

“You don’t want to be seen with me,” she’d snarled. “You’d never survive the taint in the village.”

“We are not in the village,” he had replied, standing his ground and letting the mountain wind ruffle his fair hair, “and anyway I don’t care what those idiots all think.”

“What happened,” Tammary said nastily, “when I was being passed around from one young cock to the next, you just didn’t get your turn?”

He actually blushed bright scarlet at that. “I was never part of that. I thought it was a vile thing to do.”